Pallavi Paul’s artistic practice attends to grief, from the intimate sorrow of losing a loved one to the wounds produced by political fracture. Across her work, she asks how art might create an infrastructure for accompanying grief and healing.
This exhibition responds to the fragility of human bodies, political communities, and the environments we inhabit. It is set against the medical and ecological catastrophes of recent years, unfolding alongside the resurgence of xenophobic and supremacist movements. Within this context, the exhibition positions itself as a chadar.
Chadar in Hindi translates as a covering or cloak. It could refer to a finely woven woollen shawl, a canopy of flowers above a wedding or funeral procession, or an intricately embroidered textile perfumed with rose petals and draped over the tomb of a beloved saint as an offering of refuge and healing.
To be wrapped or gathered under a chadar is to be in love’s healing embrace. Throughout Pallavi Paul’s exhibition, reverence, tenderness, and devotion appear in several ways: as the seaweed canopy of Offering to a Moving Shore (2026), as embroidered translucent fabrics in Amulet 1–5 (2025), and as the trimmings of chadars collected from Sufi shrines, incorporated into the artist’s new watercolour paintings. For bodies that have experienced humiliation and destruction, the chadar becomes an infrastructure of dignity, hope, and repair.
Imagined as a chadar, the exhibition creates a space where acts of surrender and letting go become possible. Paul’s artistic interventions do not obscure the violence, but rather remain in intimate relation to it, tracing more tender ways of looking through acts of stitching, layering, and repair. The exhibition explores how tenderness might reshape our encounter with what has been broken, while making room to dream of worlds more just and hospitable than the one we inhabit.
The exhibition is commissioned by Te Tuhi in partnership with Satellites.
→ Curatorial essay
→ About the artworks
Public Programme
→ Exhibition opening event
Saturday 8 August 2026, 2pm – 3pm
→ Fearless Listening: a workshop with Pallavi Paul
Sunday 9 August 2026, 10am – 12pm
→ Artist Floor Talk with Pallavi Paul
Saturday 15 August 2026, 10am – 11am
→ Unwounding: a workshop with Prashan Casinader-Olds
Saturday 29 August 2026, 2pm – 4pm
→ Writing Workshop with Terri Te Tau and Richard von Sturmer
Saturday 19 September 2026, 10am – 12pm
→ Book Fair (featuring Nowhere Bookstore)
Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 October 2026
About the artist
Pallavi Paul is a New Delhi-based visual artist and film scholar. She received her PhD in Film Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her work has been exhibited at the Sharjah Biennale (2025), where she received the Sharjah Biennial Prize.
Her institutional solo exhibitions include Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2024, 2023) and Berlinale Forum Expanded (2022) at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin. She has also participated in group exhibitions at the the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2025–26), Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2023, 2022); New Alphabet School, HKW Berlin (2021, 2020); Colomboscope, Sri Lanka (2021); the Rubin Museum, New York (2019); Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon (2018); AV Festival, New Castle (2018, 2016); Contour Biennale, Mechelen (2017); and Tate Modern, London (2013).
About the curator
Balamohan Shingade is a writer, curator, and researcher living in Titirangi. He has published essays on contemporary art, Indigenous-settler relations, authoritarian populism, and the Indian diaspora in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is an occasional singer of Hindustani music, and with Erena Shingade, he runs Spoor Books—an independent publisher, a community platform, and an online bookstore featuring titles from India and beyond.